Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / The Third Tab
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled The Third Tab. Here we go. I want to start with a specific morning. A startup founder wakes up at 5:30 and before her feet hit the floor, She has already opened three tabs: a competitor's product page, a rival founder's funding announcement, and a dashboard that ranks her company against six others in the market. She does this most mornings. She would call it staying informed. It feels productive. It feels like leadership. But if you stopped her right there and asked what she was actually afraid of, she couldn't tell you. She only she only knows that checking makes the feeling go away for a few minutes. Until it comes back. Here's a quote that names what's happening in that moment. It comes from Carl Jung. He said, Who looks outside dreams, who looks inside awakes. Jung wrote that after years spent studying his own mind before anyone else's. In 1913, he broke from Sigmund Freud, the mentor who had shaped his entire career. The break left him without a theory to stand on. Instead of looking outward for someone new to follow, He turned the other direction. For years, he recorded his own dreams and the strange, vivid images that came to him in waking states. He wrote them down in a private journal, long before he tried to explain any of it to another person. He wasn't gathering data about the world. He was studying the one mind that he had complete access to. That private work, done with no audience, quietly reshaped an entire field for the century that followed. Bring that back to the founder with three tabs open before sunrise. Looking outside is not, on its own, the mistake. Leaders need real information about competitors and about where they stand in the market. The trouble starts when looking outside becomes the whole practice. It runs on autopilot. It gathers more and more without ever pausing to ask the harder question: what's actually driving the need to check again? That question does not live on a competitor's product page. It lives somewhere. The dashboard cannot reach. Here's where this gets misread. People here look inside and picture something soft. Journaling, a quiet morning, 10 minutes of reflection before the real work starts. That version is comfortable because it changes nothing about how you actually operate. It slots reflection in as a small wellness habit, then sends you right back to checking the tabs exactly as before. That is not what Jung was describing. He was not proposing a morning routine. He was describing the difference between st between staying asleep inside of a habit and actually waking up to what is running it. The reframe is sharper than a wellness habit and it's less comfortable to practice. It means catching the moment right before you react. That might be the urge to check the dashboard again, call an emergency meeting, or rewrite the roadmap because a rival shipped something new. Sometimes the honest answer is real signal, something worth acting on. Often, if you're being truthful with yourself, The honest answer is fear. Fear of falling behind. Fear of looking foolish. Fear of being the one who missed it. Those two things call for completely different responses. You cannot tell them apart by looking outward one more time. You can only tell them apart by looking inward at what is actually generating the urgency. Now, let's let's name this pretty plainly because it changes what a leader's own judgment is actually for. An AI tool can scan a hundred competitors before lunch. It can summarize every funding round announced this week and flag which ones matter to your market. All that's looking outside, done faster and wider than any person could manage alone. What it cannot do is the other half of Young's quote, because it has no inside to look into. It has no old fear of falling behind. It has no private history quietly steering a decision. It has nothing to sit with and examine because there's nothing there to sit with. So the question a leader still has to answer alone. Has not gotten smaller as these tools have gotten faster. It's gotten more important. Now, is this reaction coming from what's actually happening out there or from something old and unexamined inside? No tool can ask you that question and none of them can answer it for you. So here's something to think about this week. The next time you feel the pull to check one more dashboard or read one more update, pause first. Before you react to whatever a competitor just did. Look inward instead. Ask what you're actually feeling underneath the urge to check. Name it, even roughly, and even if the answer is messy. That single pause is closer to what Young meant by looking inside than any amount of quiet time scheduled for later. Let's go back to that founder with three tabs open before sunrise. The information in those tabs might be useful. It might even be true, but it will not tell her what she needs to know most. Which is exactly why she keeps needing to check it again. That answer was never going to come from outside. It was waiting the whole time in the one place she had not thought to look.